Some very strong insights come from Don Norman’s work on design, especially the idea that good design must start from an understanding of how people actually think, interpret, and act.

With the rapid progression of AI, now acting as the knowledge engine behind many applications, the quality of the interface becomes even more important. Intelligence alone is not enough. If the interface is not clear, intuitive, and aligned with the way users understand reality, much of the value of the system is lost.

This is exactly the challenge in the Glass Plant project.

The interface must match the cognitive approach of the user while also providing the necessary input and output for the underlying software. In other words, it must connect process complexity with human understanding.

In principle, every tool should be designed to make understanding easier. But engineers are not always the best people to take care of design, unless they are made aware of this from the beginning. In engineering practice, human behaviour is often treated almost like a necessary disturbance rather than as an integral part of design.

Yet this is precisely where many systems fail.

In the Glass Plant project, we are making a serious effort to understand how people interact with process information and how to create interfaces that are simple to use despite the inherent complexity of chemical plants.

And simplicity is hard.

A well-designed interface should be visually clean and easy to navigate. Filling a screen with figures, tables, and numbers may look rigorous, but it can easily confuse the user and destroy attention. This is one of the reasons why knowledge is often overlooked.

Take a material balance as an example. It may contain a large amount of correct and valuable information, but how easily can an operator develop a quick and practical understanding of plant behaviour from rows of numbers alone?

From experience, I know how difficult it is to maintain attention when people are confronted with too many figures at once. What may be meaningful to a process engineer can become opaque to operators and uninteresting to management.

Good interfaces should not only display data. They should help people understand what is happening, what matters, and what action is possible.

This is one of the ambitions behind Glass Plant:

to make plant behaviour visible, understandable, and discussable across functions.

Not simpler because the process is simple,

but simpler because understanding matters.